Case Study: Content Ignite achieves 90% hosting cost reduction and 80% faster page loads with DigitalOcean

How Content Ignite Successfully Migrated to DigitalOcean in 2017

Content Ignite is a Bournemouth-based native advertising platform that outgrew its managed hosting setup, which slowed development, lacked key services like a CDN and object storage, and caused frequent downtime and high latency (around 200 ms). Rapid growth forced the team in 2017 to find a more scalable, self-managed solution that would reduce costs and improve performance.

They migrated to DigitalOcean using Droplets, Spaces, Load Balancers, Cloud Firewalls and Floating IPs, moving MySQL with primary/secondary replication and rsync to minimize downtime and rebuilding the stack with a CDN in front of Spaces. The result: page loads are ~80% faster (ads can load in ~500 ms), average latency dropped to ~20 ms, hosting costs fell by over 90%, and the platform now handles ~500 requests/sec while operating at about 25% capacity for quick scale-up.

Content Ignite

Jamie Druce

Senior Web Developer